Archive for the 'Elections Office' Category

Unlike Warren Slocum, who was eaten up and spit out on Tuesday by the Purple Tunnel of Doom, Anna Eshoo had seats for President Barack Obama’s inauguration that were just fine, thank you very much. (Slocum’s experience was the subject of Saturday’s print edition of The Insider.)

The congresswoman was seated up on the rostrum, right along the aisle by the door from which Obama and everyone else emerged from the Capitol. We asked her Friday for her impressions from that day.

“For me, I was overwhelmed by standing so close to history,” Eshoo said.

She said the “excitement was palpable,” whether you were up on rostrum, watching on television or standing among the millions of people gathered on the Mall. She was also struck by the absolute silence that seemed to prevail during Obama’s speech.

She said she was impressed by the speech itself, as was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“I think it was a very important speech,” she said. “The Speaker told all of us the following day that everyone should have a copy of the speech and read it and reread it.”

On Thursday, Eshoo and her colleagues on the Energy and Commerce Committee spent more than 12 hours writing up its portion of the $825 billion stimulus package, writing out the language for provisions having to do with health care, energy and telecommunications.

She said she’s confident that, despite Republican opposition to the bill, there “will be bipartisan support for it when the vote is finally taken.” She said numerous Republican amendments were incorporated into the bill and pointed to the $275 million in tax cuts included in the package.

It turns out that county elections chief Warren Slocum wasn’t able to post as many updates as he would have liked to his Twitter site yesterday because his arms were pinned to his sides by the massive crowd that gathered for President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Slocum recounted his nightmarish experience in Washington on his blog.

“I can assure you that (there)were unhappy people and that everything was not perfect,” he wrote. “There was a dark side to the inauguration.”

Slocum emphasized that this visit to Washington was still worthwhile, but he was plenty critical of the people who dreamt up Tuesday’s crowd-management system on the Mall. It’s a good read, if you’ve got a few minutes.

Warren Slocum, San Mateo County’s chief elections officer, participated in a national conference earlier this month in Washington, D.C., on America’s system of voting.

The three-day conference was put on by the Pew Center on the States and the JEHT Foundation with the goal of brainstorming solutions to common problems, from public wariness of electronic voting machines to long lines at the polls.

For Slocum, it was a chance to get creative, as he participated in a Dec. 9 panel discussion titled, “Imagine we could start over: How would you design an election system?”

Slocum was joined on that panel by half-a-dozen elections officials, including the secretaries of state for Kentucky and Missouri. The conference itself was attended by a wide range of people, from academics to congressional staffers.

One of the subjects Slocum’s panel touched on was universal voter registration. Jurisdictions throughout the country handle registration differently, so people in various states and counties fall through the cracks in different ways.

The San Mateo County Democratic Central Committee has adopted a resolution urging the county to hold an open election to fill the seat of departing Supervisor Jerry Hill, who is off to Sacramento, rather than make an appointment.

“The person who is elected or appointed to fill Jerry Hill’s seat will likely remain on the (Board of Supervisors) until he or she is termed out in 2022,” committee member Nick Akers, author of the resolution, said in a statement.

“Our county’s at-large system for electing supervisors gives a strong advantage to incumbents,” Akers continued. “It has been nearly three decades since a supervisor running for re-election has been defeated. The people of San Mateo County should be given the opportunity to fill this open seat.”

Committee members voted “overwhelmingly” on Nov. 20 in favor of the resolution for an election. They’re looking to peg a special county election to an anticipated special statewide election in June 2009.

Not that the San Mateo County government has a reputation for being clubby and nontransparent — cough, cough — but the Insider agrees with local Democrats that holding an election to fill the seat of Assemblyman Hill, irrespective of the cost, would be the democratic thing to do.

So where did it all go wrong for Barack Obama on Tuesday? He appeared to be gaining in polls of California voters leading up to the election, the Bay Area seemed to be a receptive environment for his campaign and he even looked to have run a better grassroots campaign in San Mateo County.

Meanwhile, the campaign of Hillary Clinton appeared to skirt the county, focusing on San Francisco and then skipping down to Palo Alto and Silicon Valley. For example, a listing of local events on Clinton’s Web site on the weekend before Super Tuesday contained multiple entries for Santa Clara County and not a single one for San Mateo County.

Several things appeared to have been at play. For one, we learned all over again that polls are fallible. In particular, a Zogby poll that showed Obama surging into the lead statewide turned out to be flat-out wrong.

The ruling last week against Friends of Bay Meadows by a state appeals court panel centered around 36 signatures that were collected in 2005 for a petition to save the Bay Meadows race track from demolition.

The group tried to argue that the signatures in question, which were collected from people who needed assistance in filling out the form, because of infirmity or for some other reason, should have been counted.

The 2005 petition campaign fell just short of the number of signatures needed to challenge a City Council decision approving the redevelopment of the track.

But the panel upheld the 2006 ruling of San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Mark Forcum, who found that the signatures were not accompanied by a second signature in the margin by a witness to the act, as required by law.